Full Stack Journey 013: Chris Wahl

Episode 13 of the Full Stack Journey podcast takes us away from focusing on specific technology areas and back into hearing about a guest’s own personal journey.

Joining me (Scott, your host) this month is Chris Wahl. Many of you probably already know of Chris; he’s one of the co-hosts of Datanauts, an extremely popular “sister” podcast on the Packet Pushers network. Chris is also active on Twitter (his handle is @ChrisWahl), and runs a popular technical blog.

Show Notes

What triggered your journey?

Chris’s “Don’t be a Minesweeper” presentation (he thought it was 5 years ago; SlideShare says closer to 3 years ago) is what he marks as the start of his own journey

He felt limited and felt like he couldn’t get where he wanted in his career—like he was spending all his time trying to avoid landing on a mine and exploding

So he started moving outside his comfort zone

On the topic of being a “full stack engineer”:

Completely agrees with the idea behind working toward being a full stack engineer

It’s not about knowing everything down to the most minute detail (like firmware microcode)

More about the ability to flex outside of a single discipline (or a couple disciplines)

“Partial stack” and “half stack” just don’t sound as good anyway

Can one ever be done with their full stack journey?

No! You need to always be growing. Chris likens it to going up on the down escalator, where if you’re not actively working to prevent it you’re headed back down

It’s really about the intent, and it’s a great mindset to cultivate to always pursue growth and development

Folks need to be careful not to grow too comfortable, lest technology (the escalator) push them back into irrelevance

It was the movie “Office Space” that triggered Chris’ journey

Some other pivot points in Chris’ career:

Going from a one-man shop to a larger shop with other people to challenge him

Learning automation and code (“because I’m lazy”)

What’s next for you on your journey?

Chris’ decisions are guided by his “general compass”, which is driven by his voracious reading appetite

That makes him 1-2 years “out of date” or “behind” but he feels that works well for him (more cutting edge than bleeding edge)

On the personal side, it’s home automation and Internet of Things (IoT) that are really interesting to Chris

Professionally, Chris is interested in Google’s “big data stockpiles”; he’s not sure how that will turn out but it seems interesting to him, as does Kubernetes and multi-cloud environments (perhaps a huge cloud-based multi-cloud home lab)

Feel free to use Chris’ projects on GitHub (Vester, for example) as a way to help get yourself started contributing to open source projects and learning new stuff